Nicholas Applegate, a subsidiary of Allianz AG and one of the world’s premier asset managers for the institutional, managed accounts and sub-advisory markets, recognized that it needed to become more efficient, increase sales, and enforce compliance across the enterprise. The pitch book management and creation process was targeted as an area that could be dramatically improved.

The company had also expanded into many new product offerings and needed a software solution that would scale, and at the same time reduce the administrative head count. Applegate ultimately decided to implement Heartbeat Presenter, Heartbeat Software’s industry-leading pitch book management solution. Since implementing Heartbeat Presenter, Applegate has seen a 45% decrease in administrative staff and a more streamlined pitch book management process that both regulates and empowers salespeople. The company has also experienced a dramatic improvement in monitoring and enforcing enterprise-wide compliance.

The Problem

Nicholas Applegate needed to cut costs, and management was looking throughout the enterprise for places to do it. When it came time to asses the organizational processes, Applegate was forced to take a serious look at the company’s pitch book creation process, since this process was essential to their business and yet clearly inefficient. Upon assessment, they discovered that creative services employed over fifteen full time pitch book creators and administration staff. The creative services staff was assigned to provide the sales force with consistently branded pitch books that were aligned with Applegate’s compliance practices. They were also burdened with the difficult task of delivering content that was changing daily to a sales force that was spread out all across the country.

Nicholas Applegate’s Communication Manager, Danielle Grant, explains, “We had a very centralized pitch book management process that simply wasn’t going to scale for a national sales force. We also needed to cut costs and were getting a lot of pressure from our CIO to find a system that addressed these issues.” Compliance was also an issue for Applegate. They found that sales people would often times change pre-approved pitch books and send the content out to potential clients. A mandate was set to implement a new system that addressed all of these issues within six months.

The Solution

After performing a comprehensive review of the offerings in the market place, Applegate decided to implement Heartbeat Software’s Heartbeat Presenter solution.

The initiative began with a comprehensive review of all existing pitch book content. Applegate assigned content creators to develop a consistently branded templating structure for all its PowerPoint content. A review of data sources throughout the enterprise was performed, revealing that content was being manually updated with data referenced from Excel spreadsheets. Kenji Mitsuka, Heartbeat Software’s Director of Consulting Services, recalls, “One of our goals was to make the pitch book process less of a manual effort, so we deployed our Excel to PowerPoint automated conversion technology, immediately reducing the man hours required to administer the system.”

To address the compliance issues, Applegate utilized the content locking feature and mandatory slide set functionality. “We locked all content we didn’t want the sales force to change, and used Heartbeat Presenter’s administrative features to link mandatory slides together so that sales people were forced to download pre-configured slide sets” recalls Danielle Grant. A few months later, a comprehensive training initiative was deployed including on-site and web-based training across the country. And since Applegate dramatically decreased the time it took to create and update content, they were able to cut their creative services staff by almost 50%.

Today, Applegate is running a fully functional system, and the reviews from the sales force have been overwhelmingly positive. “The implementation has been a huge success, and the feedback from the sales force has been phenomenal,” says Danielle, “They now spend less time creating presentations and more time selling...and since the system is web-based, they can access up-to-date content from anywhere. We know they’re using it because we’re running reports monthly, and to date there have been over 100,000 downloads.”